Google ’split results’ - why, how, when and what’s the impact?

May 16, 2009
by Andy Heaps

I did a search for ‘UK holidays’ today and Google had ’split’ the results:

Its something we’re seeing increasingly appearing in the SERPs, for a whole range of different keywords and search types. If you think about a search phrase like this there could be multiple searcher intents:

People looking to go on holiday in the UK
People looking for information on public / school holidays in the UK

The probability of it being one over the other will vary at different times of the year. As we’re coming up to a bank holiday in the UK more people will be looking for bank holiday / public holiday related info than at other times of the year.
Google could assess this intent and decide to split results as above in a number of ways:

Manually - It could be as simple as somebody at Google manually adjusting the SERPs a few days before a bank holiday.
Current Searcher behaviour – If an increased number of people search for ‘UK holidays’ and then refine their search to ‘UK bank holidays’ it’d make sense for Google to factor this into its algorithm automatically. Once this has happened for a certain number of searches on that query the above results will be served.
Historical searcher behaviour – Most bank holidays happen at roughly the same time each year so it should be easy for Google to look back to last year at how people searched, what they did / didn’t click through to, their search refinement process etc. And apply learnings to the results this year.

In reality it’s probably a combination of all 3.
Am I getting any traffic from results like this?
Google kindly includes some information in the referring URL that allows you to track whether you’re getting any traffic from these ‘split’ results. In the above example if somebody clicked on the direct.gov.uk listing, the referring URL would include the following querystring parameter: oi=revisions_result. Running an analytics report to show “Google referrals where referring URL contains oi=revisions_result” will give you an idea of just how many visitors these kind of results are referring to your site (and probably help you understand why you’re getting traffic for terms you don’t rank for!)
What does this mean for your SEO campaign?
It adds another level of complexity to target keyword selection - you have the opportunity to double your presence in the SERPS if you can achieve a top 3 ranking for ‘UK holidays’ and ‘UK bank holidays’. Of course in this example the split results only appear at certain times so the planning and timing of your SEO strategy will be key.